The first step towards a worldwide network for metropolitan agriculture has been taken.

The first workshop was held at the Gordon Institute for Business Science in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Friday 13 November 2009. Workshops in five other world cities are to follow shortly. The workshops are the foundation meetings of the Metropolitan Agriculture Innoversity. The Metropolitan Agriculture vision and the Innoversity initiative have been received highly enthusiastically in Johannesburg.

The Metropolitan Agriculture Innoversity is an action-oriented network of various stakeholders. It brings together partners from the agro-industry, governments, knowledge institutes and societal organisations in various world cities. The various parties meet up in the Innoversity in order to experiment with metropolitan agriculture in their city by means of concrete innovation projects. The challenging key question is how agriculture can contribute to the more sustainable development of metropolitan areas. By sharing experience with other cities the concept of metropolitan agriculture become strengthened and embedded. The first cities to be participating in the network are Amsterdam, Chennai, Detroit/Flint, London, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo.

From urban agriculture to metropolitan agriculture

The first meeting of the MetroAg Innoversity was held in Johannesburg on 13 November. According to the participants in the workshop, food security is the biggest sustainability problem in Johannesburg. In response to the problem, food gardens are being established all over the city where organic crops are being grown for the immediate environment. These are good examples of urban agriculture, but there are also clear shortcomings. There is, for example, generally a lack of linkage with the market, the initiatives depend heavily on subsidies and the initiatives are on an insufficient scale to act as a partner for other players in the agricultural system. Precisely for this reason the concept of metropolitan agriculture offered the participants fresh inspiration. Despite the major differences from the situation in the Netherlands it turned out during the workshop that the same obstacles towards innovation were being faced in Johannesburg as in the Netherlands. The metropolitan agriculture vision has inspired the workshop participants; multidisciplinary teams are to be set up in the coming months to tackle the problem on a joint basis. Further workshops are to be held in the coming months in Sao Paulo, Chennai, Detroit, London and Amsterdam.

In the spring the teams from the various cities will be meeting up in order to learn from one another how metropolitan agriculture is contributing to the sustainable development of their cities. Further information on the MetroAg Innoversity may be obtained by downloading the brochure. For more detailed information see the website of the MetroAg Innoversity.

What is metropolitan agriculture?

Many farmers perceive the city as a threat to agriculture. The encroachment of urbanisation places pressure on farmland, while the great concentration of people in activities leads to stiff competition for water, nutrients and energy. In addition large groups of urban consumers are becoming ever more demanding about their food and the way in which it is produced. Equally, many urban dwellers have a romanticised idea of agriculture that no longer squares with present-day reality. The concern over animal diseases and environmentally-polluting activities means that many urban dwellers would prefer to see the exclusion of agricultural activities from their metropolitan environment. Agriculture and the city appear to have lost their connection. Metropolitan agriculture is a vision that re-establishes and even strengthens that connection. The concept is based on the idea that the metropolitan environment in fact offers huge opportunities for the more sustainable development of agriculture, and that at the same time agriculture offers great opportunities for the more sustainable development of those metropolitan areas. We therefore refer to all forms of agriculture conducted in a metropolitan environment and that are explicitly directed towards the various needs of the urban population and make use of the urban characteristics of that environment as metropolitan agriculture.